‘They offered me 20 liters of semen for a sculpture’: Art, porn and fertility clinics

Three years ago, artist Maja Malou Lyse, 33, received the most unusual proposal of her career: the CEO of Cryos, the world’s largest sperm bank, offered her 20 liters of semen to make a sculpture. For Lyse, whose practice addresses issues such as female empowerment and the relationship between images, desire and media culture, the idea was so bizarre that she saw possibilities in it.

“I thought it was an interesting material and said yes,” she explains. “But after a while I realized I didn’t know what to do with it.”

The project ended up taking shape differently from the original plan, and today occupies Denmark’s national pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, which runs until November 22.

In the pavilion’s main space — titled Things To Come, a reference to H.G. Wells’s famous science-fiction novel — there is not a sculpture but massive screens showing a video starring female porn stars, surgically altered male bodies dressed in tiny bikinis, performing, in gestures typical of the genre, a script set in a fertility clinic.

To find inspiration while preparing the work, Lyse visited the actual clinic of Cryos, which is located in Denmark. Once there, she was struck by the facility itself.

“I thought it looked like a big film set, or a parody of what we imagine a sperm bank to be, with long corridors and smiling baby photos everywhere,” she recalls. “It was very absurd and visually interesting at the same time. When I arrived at the donation room, where porn is played on screens, I saw they had virtual-reality goggles, and they told me they were using them because, according to a study they had done, watching porn in virtual reality in some cases increased motility [the sperm’s ability to move properly] by up to 50%. They said it casually, as if it were nothing. And I thought: ‘What the hell?’ I felt that fit my practice — it was at once a familiar territory and very new to me.”

That was the spark for what is now Things To Come, a sharp reflection on many issues, including how the digital image shapes our contemporary world.

“That study [on sperm motility] seemed fascinating and terrifying at once, an example of the biological effect of the digital,” she says. “Just look at how it affects our attention span. I’ve always liked reading, but I can barely read a book anymore, because my body rejects reading a single page, so I listen to them as audiobooks. That’s due to the pace at which we receive information through digital media: our brains have adapted to that tempo.”

Another issue her work raises is the contradictory status of pornographic images. The artist explains: “For me, workers in the porn industry are the ultimate experts in creating images, because they fully understand their logic and how they circulate. Pornographic images are the most widely circulated on the web, but at the same time they are marginalized, because social media censors them and there is a stigmatizing social and cultural judgment against them. So they are everywhere and nowhere. Those contradictions interested me a great deal.”

Chus Martínez, the Spanish curator of the pavilion, wanted to reflect that complexity in a project she ironically describes as “a sort of Gracita Morales” — a reference to the beloved Spanish comic actress of the 1960s and 1970s. The goal was to remind viewers of the historical context and prevent the pavilion from falling into certain clichés.

“From the leftist and feminist tradition I come from, depicting hyper-feminized bodies is seen as taboo,” she says. “But, from what I see among younger people, it’s an aesthetic that’s already part of the mainstream. We see it in the Kardashians, or even at the MET Gala, where Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’s wife, was dressed like the porn stars in our film. They are the true owners of the image. And popular culture has simply appropriated those images afterward. But it’s the porn stars who can reclaim them and ask us why we like them so much.”

Martínez, who clarifies that she does not watch porn, says that as a Spaniard she brought to the project the context of Spain’s destape (the uncovering) phenomenon — the wave of sexual liberation and loosening of censorship that followed the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the late 1970s.

“For us, the destape culture stemmed from a deeply ambiguous desire for openness and transparency, but it was not entirely negative,“ she says. ”Making everything so obvious also helped a generation think about issues like abuse, corruption, and sexuality. Because people need to see things in order to take a stand on them. For my parents, for example, a visit they took with their friends back then to the Bagdad club in Barcelona — where there was live porn — was pivotal: they spent months afterward talking about it. For my mother, even today, seeing bodies like these reminds her that Franco and the Church hated them, and so she thinks showing them is absolutely wonderful. She called me to tell me that this project is the best thing I’ve ever done.”

The film’s protagonists are played by industry professionals, led by Nicolette Shea, considered a veteran at 39. “She’s a living legend of porn, from an older generation than the others, and I immediately wanted to put her in the sperm bank,” says Maja Malou Lyse. “So thank goodness Cryos let us film in their Orlando, Florida facilities, which are a replica of those in Denmark. We shot the video with a crew of 50 last Christmas: it was a Christmas with a porn star I will never forget. Fiction and reality, science and porn, everything was mixed.”

Two other key players took part in the project. On one side, the New York–based collective DIS, responsible for producing the video. On the other, the design and research office Common Accounts, founded by two architects, Spaniard Igor Bragado and Canadian Miles Gertler, which designed the pavilion’s interior.

“The immersive space with screens is an architectural translation of the billboard and virtual-reality goggles: one urban and public, the other intimate and personal,” explains Bragado. “Next door, in a smaller room, is a sculpture made of a row of sperm transport boxes with tiny screens. The result is a pavilion that fuses art and architecture.”

During the pavilion’s opening celebration, a performance was staged by the legendary Hungarian-Italian erotic and political icon Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, who embodies an approach to gender that predates the digital revolution and its demands for speed and immediacy.

“Maja and I both arrived at her almost unanimously,” says Chus Martínez. “I told her that Cicciolina was an important reference because we are in Italy, and the perspective in southern Europe is very different from the Scandinavian model of liberation. Today she is a highly reclaimed figure who represents a particular moment, and that reaction seems interesting to me.”

While filming the video, Maja Malou Lyse felt she was composing a kind of swan song for porn as we still know it, before artificial intelligence takes over the industry: “From now on, the image will never be the same. Now I see videos on social media where I no longer know if they’re real or AI-generated. It happened to me, for example, with that photo of Nicki Minaj holding hands with Trump.”

For her part, Chus Martínez warns: “Before long, porn won’t need actresses and actors, so it’ll do without them. What will it mean to watch AI-generated porn? I don’t know. You’ll be able to do anything to the body, because that body won’t belong to anyone: we might witness a digital version of the Marquis de Sade. Is that terrifying? Absolutely. After all, classic porn is human, but digital post-porn could get way out of hand. Someone could end up being killed, and there could be a debate over whether or not it’s a crime since it doesn’t involve a real person. The problem is the function of the image. If they get out of hand, they can have a harmful effect, beyond the moral caution that classic images already inspired in us.”

However, she also wants to make it clear that the installation itself — which does not feature any actual, explicit sex scenes despite being based on the language of porn — is neither “obscene nor pornographic.” “There’s nothing in it you couldn’t see at a Met Gala. Except the sense of humor — it’s very ironic. Keep in mind I’ve seen far more cartoons than porn in my life. In a way, this is like an episode of Fraggle Rock. I see fragility here; you can see whatever you want.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition